Math is racist

Here's an informative article from the Hampton Roads Pilot about how the federal Justice Dept. is forcing the city of Virginia Beach to change its qualifications for entering the police academy because, you'll be shocked to learn, whites do better than Hispanics and blacks on the math test:

The city has reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to resolve allegations that it discriminated against black and Hispanic police recruits. Under a consent decree filed Monday in federal court in Norfolk, the city will change the way it scores the police entrance exam.

The Justice Department had complained that the math portion of the exam had an adverse effect on minority applicants and unfairly excluded them from being hired. The city will offer to let 124 black and Hispanic former applicants resume the hiring process. Those recruits failed the math test between 2002 and 2005 but would have passed under the new standards. The city also will create a $160,000 fund to compensate those applicants.

In the 27-page settlement, the Justice Department states that the city did not intentionally discriminate against blacks and Hispanics...

After an 18-month investigation, the Justice Department found that the police force did not reflect the diversity of the city’s population because of how the math test was graded...

From 2002 to mid-2005, about 85 percent of white applicants passed the math exam, compared with 59 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics... Under the new standard, an applicant must score at least 70 percent on the reading and grammar parts of the test and score an average of at least 60 percent on all three parts of the exam.

The city will give 124 applicants a chance to resume participation in the hiring process. Of that number, the city has committed to hiring at least 15 – three Hispanics and 12 blacks – who complete the application process

In other words, the Justice Dept. is forcing the local police department to impose an explicit racial quota on itself. Isn't that, technically, a violation of the 2003 Grutter decision of the Supreme Court?

Now, it's widely believed that the existence of racial quotas stems from a nefarious perversion of the sainted 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the truth is that institutions end up imposing hiring quotas upon themselves to avoid these kind of brouhahas, which grow directly out of the 1964 Act itself. As long as the federal government is mandated to ignore the IQ difference between the races, you will end up with this kind of imposition of quotas.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer